What is your business doing to stand out in the inbox of your audience? You need to create an email marketing strategy which will give you definite results!! With 3.7 billion email users around the world, 2019 offers unprecedented access to an ever-growing audience. But with this access comes competition. What worked last year may not work this year and it’s no longer enough to adhere to standard email ‘best practices’ and expect leads and conversions to come flooding in.
Tech-savvy consumers are able to instantly discern between an email that offers value and is personalized to speak to their desires and reflect their pain points; compared to one that is monotone, generic and dull.
Technological advancements and changes in the modern media landscape have altered how receptive consumers are towards email marketing which means new approaches are needed. While this may sound scary, the truth is, you have never had a better chance to effectively implement an email marketing campaign than you do right now.
Still, as consumers become more exposed to ads, they become equally desensitized to the material they are sent. Your job is simple – stand out.
Here are the top 5 email marketing trends set to dominate in 2019. Incorporate them into your next email marketing campaign, and start standing out.
#1 – Interactivity
Your brand identity is important, but it shouldn’t overshadow the preferences of your audience.
A subscriber has shown interest in your email by clicking on it, so by utilising a two-way flow of communication or interaction you’ll be able to increase engagement and reduce friction. That’s why more and more business owners are seeing the value of reducing design and increasing interactivity.
Interactivity, or interactive content, include anything that requires a viewer to engage with the email to access the full experience. This may include tapping, swiping, or filling out a piece of content.
The movement towards interactivity in 2019 can be seen in a variety of forms. These may include:
- Review forms
- Polls
- Scratch cards
- Reviews
- Carousels
- Hotspots
Each of these touch points allows your subscribers to interact with you without leaving their inbox – a step that would otherwise risk losing a percentage. With interactive emails able to increase click-to-open rates by 73%, it is clear that consumers want to be engaged and stimulated from the moment you land in their inbox.
#2 – Hyper Personalisation
Design gets your foot in the door. Personalisation ensures you’re invited inside.
The mistake so many business owners and marketers make is to assume they’ll reap the rewards of automation. But sending 5,000 emails a day is useless if your open rate and reply rate are still sub-par.
In 2019 email marketing success will come from hyper-personalising your message. The human touch will prove far more successful than robotic automation that consumers see right through.
Keep in mind, personalisation isn’t as simple as inserting tokens to auto-populate names or other broad user data. It’s about making your customers feel like you understand exactly what problems they face and empathising with their position.
As a result your email content should be created around all the data you have available to you. For example birthday emails that offer a discount code, abandoned cart and customer wish lists, and product reminders can all be used as additional ways to captivate interest and build trust.
Do you know your subscriber’s purchasing history? Do you have their location? Do you know their age and gender? Answering these types of questions will help you provide the personal touch that helps you stand out and is part of the way you’ll get your customers to fall in love with you again.
Personalising your available data will increase engagement, increase customer satisfaction, and increase audience retention, and that’s why it’s one of the trends set to stand out in 2019.
#3 – Scaled Down Design
Visually rich newsletters and emails are being replaced by stripped-back and simplified styles that remove clutter and overt consumerism.
Text only emails that don’t overuse HTML elements will be increasingly preferred by consumers who associate this style with a trusted email from a friend or family member. In contrast, design-heavy emails are instantly recognisable as being commercial and ‘spammy’.
According to Paperclip Digital web designer Michael May, “emails are returning to their roots – as digital letters, with the use of negative space and white background now seen as a valuable tool to increase engagement rather than an obstacle. Larger fonts, brighter colours and stronger imagery can still be used to further push products or services to customers, but the user will be sparing and applied as needed, not liberally.”
This is due in part to the growing number of people opening emails on their mobile phones. With less space and short attention spans, content should be clear, easy to consume, and with an obvious call to actions.
#4 – Mobile Optimisation
61% of email opens occurred on mobile devices in 2017, with this figure continuing to grow midway through 2019.
Which means if you’re not properly formatting your emails to jump off a mobile screen, then you’re failing to align with this booming email marketing trend. It won’t matter how transformative your product is, without mobile optimised design and delivery you won’t be able to communicate with your audience the way they expect to be communicated with.
Some simple examples of incorrect formatting that you should avoid include:
✗ Images that are out of place
✗ Poor spacing between text
✗ Images without alt text
✗ Too much text
✗ Small font size
✗ Non-responsive design
✗ Images wider than 600 pixels
✗ Multi-column text layout
According to Search It Local email marketer, Diego Varoli, there are some quick tweaks you can make to your emails to ensure they stand out on mobiles, saying “start with a font size of 14 pixels as a minimum to ensure it’s easily read. You should also include a clear and obvious call to action. Fingers aren’t as accurate as a mouse, so create a CTA that is more obvious and clickable than you would on a landing page or website.”
With so many consumers opening emails on their phones you have no choice but to include responsive designs suited to small screens.
#5 – Nurture Instead Of Sell
The age of aggressive email marketing is over.
In 2019 success comes from nurturing leads and guiding them deeper into your sales funnel, no matter what stage they enter. But by being too passive your leads can cool off, meaning you’ve missed a valuable opportunity to convert.
Instead of a hard sell, focus on creating and distributing helpful and value-packed content through your emails that creates trust and fosters relationships. The simplest way to ensure you find the balance between being informative and guiding prospects towards a conversion is to focus on why you are emailing rather than what.
Being conversational is the easiest way to help stop you from drifting towards a sales pitch. Write the way you speak and address your audience as an individual. This will help you reduce the jargon that turns prospects off. In the same way, talk about them instead of you. It’s a marketing cliche, but instead of telling them how great your product is, show them how beneficial it would be in their lives.
Ready to start implementing the latest email marketing trends?
Email may be one of the oldest digital marketing strategies, but it is far from obsolete.
In 2019 email marketing is an extremely successful tool for businesses. And one of the most effective and efficient methods of driving site traffic, increasing conversions and generating sales.
Where most business owners and marketers fall is that they believe snaring an email address and landing a sale are the same. But conversions won’t magically increase just because your subscriber list has grown.
Across both B2B and B2C goals, email marketing in 2019 should be stripped down, interactive, mobile friendly, hyper personalised and nurturing.
Using these innovative strategies you can leverage the cutting edge trends of email marketing to your advantage and give your subscribers exactly what they want, to get exactly what you want in return.
What email strategies are you using to connect with your customers in 2019? Let us know in the comments!
